ANOTHER VIEW: Measure dollar value of art

It is easy to think of art as a luxury. It enriches our minds and lives, and it allows us to express ourselves to the fullest, yet it is not essential to brute survival. We value it, but beyond all measure. Art is priceless.

Consider, though, a few cold calculations: Americans spend about $14.5 billion a year on the performing arts alone - everything from opera, dance and symphony concerts to circuses, magic acts and Las Vegas shows - a 2011 study by the National Endowment for the Arts found. And according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a branch of the Commerce Department, in 2009, the performing arts, together with museums and sports activities (the bureau has traditionally grouped these into one sector), contributed $70.9 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product. In that same year, the motion-picture and sound-recording industries added $59.8 billion, and publishing contributed $147.7 billion. In other words, art does have a dollar value - it's just one that analysts haven't fully added up. So it is welcome news that the bureau will now measure the creative sector's specific effects on the macroeconomy. Thanks to a new partnership with the National Endowment, bureau researchers will make hard measurements of how much artistic and cultural activities contribute to GDP. This lends some evidence to the discussion about whether innovation and new ideas can contribute to economic growth at least as much as the investment of additional capital does. Such debates will be enriched by the new and better data to come.